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Lawyer: mother charged with son's death brainwashed(AP, October 12, 2002)

ATTLEBORO, Mass. (AP) - A religious sect member charged with allowing her
son to starve to death was powerless to stop her son's slow death because of
the group's sway over her, according to her lawyer.

But a prosecutor scoffed at the claim from Karen Robidoux's lawyer, Joseph
Krowski, and a mind-control expert that Robidoux was brainwashed by the group,
saying that members still regularly visit her in jail.

Robidoux, 27, goes to trial in January for a second-degree murder charge.
Prosecutors claim that Robidoux believed she was following a religious prophecy
made by another member of the sect when she allegedly starved her son, Samuel.

Krowski said the control and influence sect members wielded over Karen
Robidoux caused her to lose her judgment, and that she was powerless to halt
the starvation of 10-month-old Samuel.

Bristol County Assistant District Attorney Walter Shea assailed the
explanation of Robidoux's behavior.

Steven Hassan, a Cambridge cult counselor and mind-control expert, will meet
with Robidoux next week. Hassan, author and founder of the Freedom of Mind
Resource Center, has counseled other Attleboro sect members after they left the
group.

"She has apparently woken up from the trance that she has been living
under for so many years," Hassan told WPRI-TV, Channel 12, in Providence.
"And she is very angry, and she's very, very devastated."

Robidoux still communicates with sect members, such as her father-in-law and
sect leader Roland Robidoux, said Shea, who won a first-degree murder
conviction against Robidoux's husband, Jacques, who was automatically sentenced
to an automatic life sentence without possibility of parole.

"They come and visit her (in jail) once a week," Shea said.

Robidoux has been held at the Dartmouth House of Correction on bail since
her November 2000 indictment. If convicted, she faces life in prison with
possibility of parole after 15 years.

Jacques Robidoux, 29, who testified that he was following God's instructions
and thought a miracle would save the boy as solid food was withheld for 51
days, was a leader of The Body, which rejects modern medicine, government and
science. Samuel died April 26, 1999, three days shy of his first birthday.

Prosecutors say Jacques Robidoux's sister, Michelle Mingo, who was also in
the sect, concocted the prophecy that God had told her that Karen Robidoux
needed to overcome her vanity and feed her child only her own breast milk.

Mingo, who is charged as being an accessory to assault and battery on a
child, is also awaiting trial. Both Mingo and Karen Robidoux have pleaded
innocent.